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The Thematic and Narrative Features of Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis

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The Thematic and Narrative Features of Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Volume 19, Issue 12, Ver. VI (Dec. 2014), PP 54-68 e-ISSN: 2279-0837, p-ISSN: 2279-0845. www.iosrjournals.org The Thematic and Narrative Features of Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis Dr. T.K. Pius Associate Professor of English, St. Aloysius College, Elthuruth PO. Thrissur, Kerala, India- 680611 Abstract: This paper on the thematic and narrative features of Jeet Thayil's "Narcopolis" attempts to grasp the trend of recent English fiction writing in India as the author himself is hailed by the media as the leading light of the new generation Indian novelists, who are willing to take on the less salubrious realities of life in the world’s largest democracy. The novel fits into the recent literary wave of "Dark India", a body of literary fiction which seems to have found a niche in the market, writing as it does of the underbelly of Indian society: its slums, poverty, deprivations, depravations, and destitutions. The paper follows the conventional method of introducing the author and his work, situating it in the context of the author's own life and career, and in the larger context of Indian Writing in English. A major portion of the paper showcases the book's technical, thematic and literary traits which ensured its singular achievement in the art of fiction writing. There are a number of brief reviews on the book revealing readers' appreciation and spontaneous reaction to the technical and thematic issues projected in the novel. However, I believe this is the first serious paper of its kind on the novel, which attempts to feature its strengths through textual evidences and analysis. Thayil's book shows a unique advancement in the direction of experimentation with narrative technique that aids an amazingly accurate depiction of reality. Key words: Plot - Characterization - narrative technique - thematic features I. Introduction Thayil is a poet and musician who has been writing poetry since he was thirteen. Not very far from joining the league of Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai, Jeet Thayil, an alcoholic and drug addict for nearly two decades, found his antidote in writing with his debut novel Narcopolis. There are comparisons drawn between Narcopolis and its thematic literary precedents like those of the writings of Burroughs, Baudelaire, and Paul Bowles or with other Commonwealth writers like J. M. Coetzee or Margaret Atwood. Some readers might as well be reminded of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater or Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting for its ability to make the audience see the world with its psychedelically distorted but earnest vision. Yet, it is not easy to state categorically that Thayil's Narcopolis, a tale of opium dens and heroin addiction in Mumbai, joins the above select group. Thayil belongs to the brave new generation of Indian authors who challenge the established norms of writing, and hardly fear controversy when furthering their opinions. He is now being hailed as the leading light of a new generation of Indian novelists, who are willing to take on the less salubrious realities of life in the world‘s largest democracy. Narcopolis fits into the recent literary wave of "Dark India", a body of literary fiction which seems to have found a niche in the market, writing as it does of the underbelly of Indian society: its slums, poverty, deprivations, depravations, and destitutions. Narcopolis, with its setting on Bombay's Shuklaji Street of the 1970s, and 1980s crowded with opium dens and brothels, with its cast of drug addicts, drug peddlers, prostitutes, criminals, and even a eunuch is a book which definitely sets out to depict a non- shining India, which may be a more faithful representation than what it had been the norm up until recently, of the exotic, lush, extravagant India. While presenting Narcopolis at the Jaipur Literary Fest in 2012, Thayil had this to say about Salman Rushdie‘s ban in India: "It seems there is a contingent of people at every gathering looking at a sentence or a gesture to get offended. It is cheapening of the idea of rebellion" (Samantara). This is a sentiment that the entire younger generation in India, finds agreeable. This sort of courage and conviction, largely unheard of for many years, is a great sign of changing times in the sub-continent. II. Life and Career Born in Kerala, Thayil is the son of TJS George - the columnist extraordinaire - who writes hard-hitting articles on politics and society for the New Indian Express. His sister too, is a well-known journalist. Thayil was married to Shakti Bhatt, a revered blogger and editor. Tragically, she passed away in 2007, at a very young age, of a brief illness. She was immensely popular amongst literary circles, and the government has even instituted an award in her honour. Thus it is easy to assume that writing would have come easily to Thayil. In his younger age, Thayil split his time growing up between Hong Kong, Bombay, and New York City. He received a Masters in Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and is the recipient of grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Swiss Arts Council, the British Council and the Rockefeller Foundation. He continued this pattern as an adult: spending twelve years working as a journalist DOI: 10.9790/0837-191265468 www.iosrjournals.org 54 | Page The Thematic and Narrative Features of Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis in Hong Kong, another ten or so years in Bombay, and in 1998 returning to New York to earn his MFA. In 2004, he moved back to India and began writing Narcopolis. Thayil has said he wrote the novel, to create a kind of memorial, to inscribe certain names in stone. As one of the characters in Narcopolis says, it is only by repeating the names of the dead that we honour them. He admits in an interview that his inspiration for the book was Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and writers of his generation particularly Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Satanic Verses (Mitra) Narcopolis was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. The jury wrote "Poetry is not often a stepping stone to the novel, but we very much admired his perfumed prose from the drug dens and back streets of India's most concentrated conurbation."(Singh) Thayil won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013 at DSC Jaipur Literature Festival for this novel. Narcopolis was also shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize (2013). Though it is his first novel, Thayil is no stranger to the written word. He has published and edited several volumes of poetry, including These Errors Are Correct, English, Apocalypso and Gemini and is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008) and, not to stop there, Thayil is also a songwriter and musician. III. Setting of Narcopolis Thayil's Narcopolis is set in Bombay, for the most part, but it is not the glorified slum Bombay of Slumdog Millionaire or the Anglo-influenced post-colonial India of Vikram Seth‘s novels or Satyajit Ray‘s masterful films. Rather he sets his rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel in Bombay, a city made of islands reclaimed by the British, a polyglot culture where all of India's languages, faiths and castes mingle, where the prevailing currency is money and its dreams are told, in those schmaltzy, kitschy Bollywood movies, and which lives on an edge, periodically blown up when terrorists set explosives, but returning to life the next day, resilient and resigned. The ingenuity of Thayil's novel lies in how he has squeezed this entire universe into an opium den in all its compelling squalor in the 1970s and '80s, with a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs. The Judges making an assessment of the novel said, "Bombay is the first and last word of this first novel, an urban history written by a former drug addict through the changing composition of opiates and the changing characters of their users." (BBC, 11 October 2012) Thayil paints a stark portrait of Mumbai. The city is frenetic, but in the opium den time moves very slowly. He recollects his deep relationship with Bombay, his addiction and how this book came about: "I went to school there as a boy. I went to St. Xavier's. My family left for Hong Kong when I was eight where my father was working as a journalist. Then I went to school in New York and then came back to Bombay in 1979 and joined Wilson College. In all, I've lived in Bombay for almost 20 years." (Jaiman) When he was asked why it makes him feel strongly about the city, he said: "Bombay does that to people. It makes a (connection) with you. It makes it difficult for you. It bludgeons you. I've been reading about that area, Shuklaji Street. It is disappearing now - Kamatipura, Shuklaji street, (the) entire area between Mumbai Central and Grant Road is disappearing, being bought away by real estate sharks who are buying up all the broken-down houses and making tall buildings. So very soon that entire district will disappear, and with it a million stories. A look of Bombay will go... a certain character will go. Those people who live there now of course won't be able to afford to live there." (Jaiman) At the end of Narcopolis, the author quite indignant to draw the picture of present Bombay as a very uniform-looking place bearing a high-rise tenement kind of look of uniformity brought about by the political changes wholly supported by the right-wing, and the kind of socio-economic changes widening the rich-poor divide.
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